Senate Again Tries to Wrest Crypto from Clinton

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Senate Again Tries to Wrest Crypto from Clinton

Seeking to yank control of US encryption policy development from the White House, four lawmakers said Tuesday that they will reintroduce Pro-CODE, a market-friendly encryption bill that stalled in committee during this past session of Congress.

Senators Conrad Burns (R-Montana), Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), and Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) heralded the reintroduction of the Promotion of Commerce Online in the Digital Era Act as a bipartisan attempt at staving off the Clinton administration's third-party "key recovery" plan of encryption export, and "putting us on the right side of history." The lawmakers appeared via teleconference from Washington at the annual RSA Data Security Conference in San Francisco.

"This is a strategy of getting us out in front of what I call the encryption curve," Wyden said. "The old school believes in top-down federalized policies, but that isn't going to work for this medium."

The Pro-CODE bill, which Burns' spokesman Matt Raymond describes as "identical or very close" to legislation by the same name that was stranded in Senate committee during the waning days of the 104th Congress, would ease export restrictions on strong US encryption technology, and would allow for the export of such strong encryption without the White House's beloved key recovery system.

The original bill, co-sponsored by then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, landed in Congress last May with much fanfare, and co-sponsors of the bill now hope that by introducing it early on this session, it will stand a better chance of passing.

"Basically, it levels the playing field for our software companies to compete in a global market," Burns said to an applauding and jovial crowd. "Key escrow won't work," the senator added flatly. He urged encryption software and hardware developers to contact members of Congress and the White House to express their support for Pro-CODE.

But speaking politely yet firmly after the legislators' announcement, the so-called "old school" US Envoy of Cryptography, Ambassador David Aaron, pressed the White House's case that a third party key recovery system on encryption export would "ensure public safety."

"The administration in no way seeks to expand power of law enforcement or to reduce citizens' privacy," Aaron promised.

Under the White House key recovery system, businesses would be required to provide governments or trusted third parties with keys to their encryption code when exported overseas. Domestic key recovery would be voluntary. Opponents of key recovery argue that the keys could easily fall into the wrong hands, resulting in abuses of power by unscrupulous governments, and potential human-rights violations. In addition, they say key recovery would hamper free trade.

Aaron, who is also special envoy to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is finalizing international guidelines on cryptography to be released this spring, said the Clinton administration planned to introduce encryption legislation that would include key recovery.

An executive order signed by President Clinton would ease export restrictions to a level of 56 bits for applicants who agree to give up a copy of their decoding keys. Aaron added that the administration would "work with the four gentlemen you saw this morning."